'I am made all things to all men . . . I please all men in all things.' - Paul
men, and in acceptance with Almighty God.
Chapter 9 - CAPTAIN ANYTHING
'I am made all things to all men . . . I please all men in all things.' - Paul
Captain Anything came originally from the ancient town of Fair-
speech.
Fair-speech had many royal bounties and many special privileges
bestowed upon it, and Captain Anything and his family had come to
many titles and to great riches in that ancient, loyal, and honourable
borough. My Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-
speech (from whose ancestors that town first took its name), as also
such well-known commoners as Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-
ways, and Mr. Two-tongues were all sprung with Captain Anything
from the same ancient and long-established ancestry. As to his
religion, from a child young Anything had sat under the parson of the
parish, the same Reverend Two-tongues as has been mentioned
above. And our budding soldier followed the example of his minister
in that he never strove too long against wind or tide, or was ever to be
seen on the same side of the street with Religion when she was
banished from court or had lost her silver slippers. The crest of the
Anythings was a delicately poised weathercock; and the motto
engraved around the gyrating bird ran thus: 'Our judgment always
jumps according to the occasion.' As a military man, Captain Anything
is described in military books as a proper man, and a man of courage
and skill - to appearance. He and his company under him were a sort
of Swiss guard in Mansoul. They held themselves open and ready for
any master. They lived not so much by religion or by loyalty as by the
fates of worldly fortune. In his secret despatches Diabolus was wont to
address Captain Anything as My Darling; and be sure you recruit your
Switzers well, Diabolus would say; but when the real stress of the war
came, even Diabolus cast Captain Anything off. And thus it came about
that when both sides were against this despised creature he had to
throw down his arms and flee into a safe skulking place for his life.
In that half-papist, half-atheistic country called France there is a
class of politicians known by the name of Opportunists. They are a
kind of public men that, we are thankful to say, are not known in
Protestant and Evangelical England, but they may be pictured out and
described to you in this homely way: An Opportunist stands well out
of the sparks of the fire, and well in behind the stone wall, till the
fanatics for liberty, equality, and fraternity have snatched the chestnuts out of the fire, and then the Opportunist steps out from his
safe place and blandly divides the well-roasted tid-bits among his
family and his friends. As long as there is any jeopardy, the Jacobins
are denounced and held up to opprobrium; but when the jeopardy
and the risk are well past, the sober-minded, cautious, conservative,
and responsible statesmen walk off with the portfolios of place and
privilege and pay under their honest arms.
But these are the unprincipled papists and infidels of a
mushroom republic; and, thank God, such spurious patriotism, and
such sham and selfish statesmanship, have not yet shown their
miserable heads among faithful, fearless, straightforward, and
uncalculating Englishmen. At the same time, if ever that continental
vice should attack our national character, we have two well-known
essays in our ethical and casuistical literature that may with perfect
safety be pitted against anything that either France or Italy has
produced. Even if they are but a master's irony, let all ambitious men
keep Of Cunning and Of Wisdom for a Man's Self under their pillow.
Let all young men who would toady a great man; let all young
ministers who would tune their pulpit to king, or court, or society; let
all tradesmen and merchants who prefer their profits to their
principles - if they have literature enough, let them soak their honest
minds in our great Chancellor's sage counsels; and he who promoted
Anything and dubbed him his Darling, he will, no doubt, publish both
a post and a title on his birthday for you also.
'What religion is he of?' asks Dean Swift. 'He is an Anythingarian,'
is the answer, 'for he makes his self-interest the sole standard of his
life and doctrine.' And Archbishop Leighton, a very different
churchman from the bitter author of the Polite Conversations, is
equally contemptuous toward the self-seeker in divine things. 'Your
boasted peaceableness often proceeds from a superficial temper; and,
not seldom, from a supercilious disdain of whatever has no
marketable use or value, and from your utter indifference to true
religion. Toleration is an herb of spontaneous growth in the soil of
indifference. Much of our union of minds proceeds from want of
knowledge and from want of affection to religion. Many who boast of
their church conformity, and that no one hears of their noise, may
thank the ignorance of their minds for that kind of quietness.' But by far the most powerful assault that ever was made upon lukewarmness
in religion and upon self-seeking in the Church was delivered by Dante
in the tremendous third canto of his Inferno: -
Various tongues,
Horrible languages, outcries of woe,
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
With hands together smote that swelled the sounds,
Made up a tumult that for ever whirls
Round through that air with solid darkness stain'd,
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.
I then, with error yet encompass'd, cried,
'O master! What is this I hear? What race
Are these, who seem so overcome with woe?'
He then to me: 'This miserable fate
Suffer the wretched souls of those who lived
Without or praise or blame, with that ill band
Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
Were only. Mercy and Justice scorn them both.
Speak not of them, but look and pass them by.'
Forthwith, I understood for certain this the tribe
Of those ill spirits both to God displeasing
And to His foes.
Those wretches who ne'er lived,
Went on in nakedness, and sorely stung
By wasps and hornets, which bedewed their cheeks
With blood, that mix'd with tears dropp'd to their feet,
And by disgustful worms was gathered there.
Now, we must all lay it continually and with uttermost
humiliation to heart that we all have Captain Anything's opportunism,
his self-interest, his insincerity, his instability, and his secret
deceitfulness in ourselves. That man knows little of himself who does
not despise and hate himself for his secret self-seeking even in the
service of God. For, how the love of praise will seduce and corrupt this
man, and the love of gain that man! How easy it is to flatter and adulate this man out of all his former opinions and his deepest
principles, and how an expected advantage will make that other man
forget now an old alliance and now a deep antipathy! How often the
side we take even in the most momentous matters is decided by the
most unworthy motives and the most contemptible considerations!
Unstable as water, Reuben shall not excel. Double-minded men, we,
like Jacob's first-born, are unstable in all our ways. We have no anchor,
or, what anchor we sometimes have soon slips. We have no fixed pole-
star by which to steer our life. Any will-o'-the-wisp of pleasure, or
advantage, or praise will run us on the rocks. The searchers of
Mansoul, after long search, at last lighted on Anything, and soon made
an end of him. Seek him out in your own soul also. Be you sure he is
somewhere there. He is skulking somewhere there. And, having found
him, if you cannot on the spot make an end of him, keep your eye on
him, and never say that you are safe from him and his company as
long as you are in this soul-deceiving life. And, that Anything will not
be let enter the gates of the city you are set on seeking, that will go
largely to make that sweet and clean and truthful city your very
heaven to you.
'I am made all things to all men, and I please all men in all things.'
One would almost think that was Captain Anything himself, in a frank,
cynical, and self-censorious moment. But if you will look it up you will
see that it was a very different man. The words are the words of
Anything, but the heart behind the words is the heart of Paul. And this,
again, teaches us that we should be like the Messiah in this also, not to
judge after the sight of our eyes, nor to reprove after the hearing of
our ears. Miserable Anything! outcast alike of heaven and hell! But, O
noble and blessed Apostle! the man, says Thomas Goodwin, who shall
be found seated next to Jesus Christ Himself in the kingdom of God.
Happy Paul: happy even on this earth, since he could say, and in
the measure he could say with truth and with sincerity, such self-
revelations as these: 'Unto the Jews I am become as a Jew that I might
gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I
might gain them that are under the law. To them that are without law,
as without law, that I might gain them that are without law. To the
weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak; I am made all
things to all men, that I might by all means save some. Giving none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the Church of
God. Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own
profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved.' Noble words,
and inspiring to read. Yes: but look within, and think what Paul must
have passed through; think what he must have been put through
before he, - a man of like selfish passions as we are, a man of like
selfish passions as Anything was, - could say all that. Let his crosses
and his thorns; his raptures up to the third heaven, and his body of
death that he bore about with him all his days; let his magnificent
spiritual gifts, and his still more magnificent spiritual graces tell how
they all worked together to make the chief of sinners out of the
blameless Pharisee, and, at the same time, Christ's own chosen vessel
and the apostle of all the churches. Boasting about his patron apostle,
St. Augustine says: 'Far be it from so great an apostle, a vessel elect of
God, an organ of the Holy Ghost, to be one man when he preached and
another when he wrote; one man in private and another in public. He
was made all things to all men, not by the craft of a deceiver, but from
the affection of a sympathiser, succouring the diverse diseases of souls
with the diverse emotions of compassion; to the little ones dispensing
the lesser doctrines, not false ones, but the higher mysteries to the
perfect - all of them, however, true, harmonious, and divine.' The
exquisite irony of Socrates comes into my mind in this connection, and
will not be kept out of my mind. By instinct as well as by art Socrates
mixed up the profoundest seriousness with the humorous affectation
of qualities of mind and even of character the exact opposite of what
all who loved him knew to be the real Socrates. 'Intellectually,' says Dr.
Thomson, 'the acutest man of his age, Socrates represents himself in
all companies as the dullest person present. Morally the purest, he
affects to be the slave of passion and borrows the language even of the
lewd to describe a love and a good-will far too exalted for the
comprehension of his contemporaries. This irony of his disarmed
ridicule by anticipating it; it allayed jealousy and propitiated envy;
and it possibly procured him admission into gay circles from which a
more solemn teacher would have been excluded. But all the time it
had for its basis a real greatness of soul, a hearty and an unaffected
disregard of public opinion, a perfect disinterestedness, and an entire
abnegation of self. He made himself a fool in order that fools by his folly might be made wise; he humbled himself to the level of those
among whom his work lay that he might raise some few among them
to his own level; he was all things to all men, if by any means he might
save some. Till Alcibiades ends the splendid eloge that Plato puts into
his mouth with these words, "All my master's vice and stupidity and
worship of wealthy and great men is counterfeit. It is all but the
Silenus-mask which conceals the features of the god within; for if you
remove the covering, how shall I describe to you, my friends and boon
companions, the excellence of the beauty you will find within!
Whether any of you have seen Socrates in his serious mood, when he
has thrown aside the mask and disclosed the divine features beneath
it, is more than I know. But I have seen them, and I can tell you that
they seemed to me glorious and marvellous, and, truly, godlike in their
beauty."'
Well, now, I gather out of all that this great lesson: that it is, to
begin with, a mere matter of temperament, or what William Law
would call a mere matter of complexion and sensibility, whether, to
begin with, a man is hard, and dry, and narrow, and stiff, and proud,
and scornful, and cruel; or again, whether he is soft and tender, broad
and open, and full of sympathy and of the milk of human kindness. At
first, and to begin with, there is neither praise nor blame as yet in the
matter. A man is hard just as a stone is hard; it is his nature. Or he is
soft as clay is soft; it is again his nature. But, inheriting such a nature,
and his inherited nature beginning to appear, then is the time when
the true man really begins to be made. The bad man dwells in
contentment, and, indeed, by preference, at home in his own hard,
proud, scornful, resentful heart; or, again, in his facile, fawning, tide-
waiting, timeserving heart; and thus he chooses, accepts, and prefers
his evil fate, and never seeks the help either of God or man to enable
him to rise above it. Paul was not, when we meet him first, the sweet,
humble, affable, placable, makeable man that he made himself and
came to be after a lifetime of gospel-preaching and of adorning the
gospel he preached. And all the assistances and all the opportunities
that came to Paul are still coming to you and to me; till, whether
naturally pliable and affectionate or the opposite, we at last shall come
to the temperament, the complexion, and the exquisite sensibility of
Paul himself. Are you, then, a hard, stiff, severe, censorious, proud, angry, scornful man? Or are you a too-easy, too-facile man-pleaser and
self-seeker, being all things to all men that you may make use of all
men? Are you? Then say so. Confess it to be so. Admit that you have
found yourself out. And reflect every day what you have got to do in
life. Consider what a new birth you need and must have. Number your
days that are left you in which to make you a new heart, and a new
nature, and a new character. Consider well how you are to set about
that divine work. You have a minister, and your minister is called a
divine because by courtesy he is supposed to understand that divine
work, and to be engaged on it night and day in himself, and in season
and out of season among his people. He will tell you how you are to
make you a new heart. Or, if he does not and cannot do that; if he
preaches about everything but that to a people who will listen to
anything but that, then your soul is not in his hands but in your own.
You may not be able to choose your minister, but you can choose what
books you are to buy, or borrow, and read. And if there is not a
minister within a hundred miles of you who knows his right hand
from his left, then there are surely some booksellers who will advise
you about the classical books of the soul till you can order them for
yourselves. And thus, if it is your curse and your shame to be as
spongy, and soapy, and oily, and slippery as Anything himself; if you
choose your church and your reading with any originality, sense, and
insight, you need not fear but that you will be let live till you die an
honest, upright, honourable, fearless gentleman: no timid friend to
unfashionable truth, as you are to-night, but a man like Thomas
Boston's Ettrick elder, who lies waiting the last trump under a
gravestone engraven with this legend: Here lies a man who had a
brow for every good cause. Only, if you would have that written and
read on your headstone, you have no time to lose. If I were you I
would not sit another Sabbath under a minister whose preaching was
not changing my nature, making my heart new, and transforming my
character; no, not though the Queen herself sat in the same loft. And I
would leave the church even of my fathers, and become anything as